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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

There's a big gap between 'inventing' a steam engine as a diagram in a book or table top novelty and physically creating one that can do more work than a horse or two, can work continuously, and is safe to use.

The technical advances of Newcomen and Watt also coincided with the ability to create boilers and pressure chambers that didn't explode (too often).

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When we're talking about industrial revolution type of stuff, there is a whole train of dependencies that I suspect would have been difficult to speed up a lot. Maybe if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed though you could make arguments both ways given the Roman Empire as a slave society didn't necessarily need a lot of labor saving devices.

The genuine innovations that mostly just needed ideas and the will to put them into practice were probably more in realms like health/medicine. Even a lot of science, your hypothetical time traveler might have been "right" but in many cases would have no way to prove it.

The use of the word dependencies in this context is perfect.

Untangling the history of technological innovation is an adventure into dependency hell.

Hell, even today if a CME or something wipes out our electronics we'll have to go way back to vacuum tubes or even simpler setups to restore our society since most modern electronics need modern electronics to be designed and manufactured.

You can make something as complicated as a 6502 processor with just electricity for furnaces, motors, and pumps, without using any electronics.

You’d have to go back to hand-cut Rubylith for the mask sets.

Hand made transistors are no problem, just more expensive.

People still do this stuff for fun too. So it's not some lost knowledge.

I wouldn't be surprised if some colleges taught this as part of a history of computers course.

It could be a pretty nice 'coffee table book': a walk through history of inventions, with the dependencies of each one listed (to one or maybe two degrees only of course).

You could pick it up anywhere, read forwards; back from something specific (or forward, if you made it a doubly linked list?); or back from whatever 'the end' would be.

It would be interesting to see if there's a way this dependency graph could be captured and saved for future generations in the event of civilisation collapsing. I suspect something like that would rapidly reduce the time it takes for society to rebuild because it wouldn't have to spend energy figuring out what doesn't work all over again as much.

Both of you might be interested to check out "How to Invent Everything" [1] - it's even got flowcharts the kind you mention at the end! [2]

[1] https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ [2] https://mohamadacma.com/content/images/2022/04/825235c6-665f...

Cheers for this, looks interesting!

You might be interested in James Burke's TV Show Connections!

Which does this sort of thing for like 8 episodes. Go and learn why you can't have cars without swamp gasses!

Connections is also a book too!

Slavery was largely defunct for it's last ~250 years as serfdom-like systems took over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Byzantine_Empir...

Most Romans (excluding the salves who were not Romans despite being the majority in Rome) would have been better off with a good steam engine. However before you get to good you need to go through a lot of working toys that are not worth having. Tractors (tractors have replaced almost half historical human labor, with various automated spinning/weaving machines most of the rest - everything else done by humans, slaves or not is a footnote) are vastly better than slaves, but there is a reason when John Deere bought a tractor company in 1918 they wrote all their dealers something to the effect of the horse drawn plow will always be the backbone of the American farm - early tractors were not better than human labor in general.

That is true, but I don't think there is much evidence for people imagining steam engines for doing useful work prior to Thomas Savery (update: Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont appears to have preceded him by almost a century.) Admittedly, absence of evidence does not settle the issue, but AFAIK Leonardo never sketched one, even though he did propose a steam cannon. If he had conceived of a rotary steam engine, or the idea was 'in the air', how could he have resisted the appeal of a horseless carriage?

One technical point: Jerónimo's and Savery's pumps used pressurized steam, but Newcomen and Watt used it at atmospheric pressure. The latter, at least, was dead set against using pressurized steam on account of the risks it posed given the technology of the day (a well-founded concern, as it turned out.)

Hello, author here. I mention this in Part I to link to a prior piece specifically on Ayanz, as this is hugely misunderstood. Ayanz’s machine only used the expansive force of steam, while Savery’s used both atmospheric pressure and the expansive force of steam. This is an absolutely crucial distinction. They were not at all the same, and Ayanz’s populariser and biographer specifically noted the difference.

Two or three parts.

First understanding at least some level what is happening or some useful effect. Second having materials and resources(like fuel) to build it to exploit the effect. Third actually having a use for whole thing.

World and what was possible was just different back then. It is rather eye opening to remember how recent some things are. Like precision manufacturing such as metal lathe. Not that small parts were not done before, but it was all by hand...

Indeed. I’ll get to that in Part III (or IV if it’s too long). And it’s why I’ve tried to point out evidence of actual use rather than just the diagrams themselves (though those are at least a start when it comes to subsequent improvement). Safety is certainly a big issue, and Savery’s engines often struggled with it (for the expansive phase of operations). As you say, it’s about the “too often”!

Advances in manufacturing processes is often overlooked in the industrial age.

Exactly. This was a materials science problem rather than a limitation of coming up with a design for a steam engine.

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